The Blog of Brandon Milford - Marketing, Entrepreneurship, and Design

No Deal.

Word is spreading fast that Facebook turned down an
acquisition offer for $750 million because they’re holding out for $2 billion. Impressive
considering News Corp purchased MySpace for $580 million last July. The
question of whether they should have taken the $750 million offer is obviously impossible
for most of us to answer. Regardless, what a great PR move on their part.
Making it public that they turned down a $750 million offer and they’re holding
out for $2 billion certainly benefits Facebook, in terms of attracting more
subscribers and getting additional offers from possible acquirers. I would guess they have a number
closer to $1 billion in mind and are publicly claiming they are holding out
for $2 billion in hopes of meeting someplace in the middle, but who knows.

I’ve been reading Al and Laura Ries’ (father and daughter marketing
duo) The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding and after only a few chapters in I
have to say that I’m already impressed. One of the greatest points they make
early in the book is about focus. They remind us the importance
of focusing your business and brand and not attempting to be everything to
everyone. They use examples like Federal Express who, early on, struggled in
the delivery business but decided to narrow its focus to overnight delivery
only. By concentrating solely on this niche Federal Express owned the word “overnight”
in the minds of consumers and this helped vault FedEx to where they are today. Today
they have obviously diversified and no longer offer only an overnight option,
but they continue to own the word “overnight” in the minds of consumers. There
are more examples including Starbucks, Nokia, Toys “R” Us, and Dominos Pizza who
are at the top of their industries because of their focus. I think this is a
great lesson. Just because you have the ability to offer “x, y, and z” it doesn’t
mean that offering “y and z” will be the best use of resources and, perhaps
more importantly, it becomes a greater challenge in saying “hey, we stand for
this”, when “this” is everything under the sun.

In case you haven’t heard the former CEO of AltaVista, Jim Barnett, and an executive at Overture are launching an ad network called Turn. There’s a lot of hype surrounding the launch and the claim is that it will target users with precision "we’ve not yet seen". They have raised two rounds of VC funding (just shy of $20 million in total) and word has it they have 16 PhDs in-house. This better be good.

I just completed the recent ebook from the guys at 37signals,
Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier
way to build a web application. I have followed these guys for quite some
time and use one of their products, Basecamp, to manage various projects for
IntelliContact. I love Basecamp, it is straight forward, simple to use, and contains
only the essential functionality (a theme present within all of their applications).
If you have followed 37signals you are aware of their mantra of keeping things
simple and providing less in terms of functionality. In Getting Real they continue to emphasize the importance of keeping
things simple and only including the necessary functionality within your web
application.

I love having all of their concepts in one place. Within
this ebook they cover everything from getting started to supporting your
software. One of the greatest points covered in this book and actually something
that we have begun practicing is the idea of Fix Time and Budget, Flex Scope. This means that if you are planning
to launch on June 1^st, no matter what, launch something on June 1^st.
Perhaps it isn’t the glamorous app that you are envisioning, but hey that can
come later. By stating that you are going to launch on a certain date, no
matter what, you are working within constraints and forcing yourself to
prioritize features and cut out the excess fluff. Also, as they put it “launching
something great that’s a little smaller in scope than what is planned is better
than launching something mediocre and full of holes because you had to hit some
magical time, budget, or scope window”.

At 177 pages Getting
Real is packed full of best practices to help you launch and maintain your
web application. Obviously not all concepts will be applicable to your
situation, but I promise you will benefit greatly from reading Getting Real. Learn more about Getting Real and purchase your copy
here.

Thanks to TopTenReviews.com for giving IntelliContact the Silver Award among email marketing software providers! You can read the review in its entirety here and also check out a side-by-side comparison among competitors.

Email marketing is about to get a whole lot easier (and attractive too!)

A new ‘face’ for IntelliContact is coming this summer.
Stay tuned - more screen shots to come.

Click here to be notified once it launches.

For those of you interested, Google has released their annual report. Pretty impressive revenue growth over the last three years.

• 2003: $1,465,934,000

• 2004: $3,189,223,000

• 2005: $6,138,560,000

So I have been testing Ingenio’s Pay-Per-Call advertising
service over the last six months. For those of you who are not familiar with
Ingenio’s service basically it works like this: through a partnership with AOL,
Ingenio will place an ad, similar to a Cost-Per-Click ad, within AOL’s search
results. Instead of clicking the ad and visiting your website, if someone
clicks the ad they are taken to a landing page that features additional
information on your company. Within the advertisement there is a toll free
number that Ingenio assigns to you that is forwarded to your business’ phone
number.

This allows Ingenio to track the number of phone calls you
have received through this ad and charge you accordingly. So it works similar
to a Cost-Per-Click (CPC) ad, but you are charged for each phone call that you
receive.

One of the greatest challenges that I have faced is tracking
conversions from this traffic. Currently I’m offering a small discount to those
who call via the assigned phone number and mention the ad. There are a couple
of issues here; one is that they do not see this offering until after they
click the ad and some may not click the ad, never seeing the offering on the
landing page. The second problem is that some will forget to mention that they
called because of the ad. That is very frustrating for me because with my CPC
ads I can see everything and I know who came through those ads and signed up
for trials and full accounts and reliably calculate the return on investment.
With Ingenio there’s a little too much guesswork involved.

I believe Ingenio’s solution is great for businesses wanting
to reach out to their local market. When I set up an account back in September
many terms weren’t receiving bids so you could easily have your ad shown for
search phrases specific to your industry and location. We’re reaching out to a
global market, receive many incoming calls per day, and carefully measure the
return that each ad generates. The primary issue is tracking the conversions,
so if I can’t come up with a reliable way to achieve this, I don’t see any
reason to continue using the service.

I’m investing a significant amount of capital in advertising
and what’s frustrating is when I look out over the new landscape of the web and
see applications growing rapidly with little to no investment in marketing. So
this brings up a question that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: Obviously
advertising is an important aspect of marketing, but where is advertising’s
place as we further this push into Web 2.0? Yes, I too am sick of hearing the
term ”Web 2.0”, but the fact remains, people are sharing their opinions in mass
and we as marketers must pay attention and consider this in our efforts.

Advertising is important, but public relations can be much
more powerful and can require a small investment in launching your message and
brand. I believe advertising should be used to further solidify the message
that you are building through public relations. By utilizing blogs and public
relations you are establishing trust in your company, product, and building
brand recognition.

We’ve been thinking a lot about how to continue improving
everything we do from customer interaction to the quality of our software. How
can we make our software better? How can we take that extra step to give our
clients something they didn’t expect? What are the steps I can take to better
communicate to our clients? This is all part of public relations and can come
with a small price tag, but can act as a catalyst that sparks enormous growth
for our company. If we give our clients something worth talking about they will
share this experience with others. Advertising can take that experience and cement
it within the minds of all that see our ads.

I’ve followed Phinney/Bischoff for quite a while and I’m a fan of their work. Their Director of Business Development, Erin Keaty just posted a great article on their blog. Her article touches a topic we’ve been discussing within the office; brand differentiation. This quote says it all, "Brand difference is the emotional distance between a diamond from Tiffany’s and a diamond from Zales." What truly differentiates your company from the competition is the feeling you can provide those that interact with your brand. The most successful companies are those that can do this effectively. Check out Erin Keaty’s article here.